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Please pardon my excessive optimism for a moment, but I think there's a pretty good chance that for every troll that wants to be the biggest, most annoying criminal in the game, that there would be a player who wants to be the famous hero who brings him down. There are a lot of gamers that don't want to be the rampaging criminal, and want to be the good guy instead. Personally, whenever I'm given the choice between good and evil in a video game, I always take the good path. I think being evil is usually the cheap way out of situations. I don't find it very fun. I'm sure there are many others out there like me.

Obviously not speaking for the majority of horrendous drivers on the roads today, but as an excellent and safe driver, I don't trust anyone or anything other than myself driving my car. No matter how fast a computer works, it has nothing on a human brain in a life-or-death situation. Our brains are much more capable of taking in way more information into consideration than a computer. As a programmer, I just don't trust computers enough to make life-or-death decisions for me. Unintended side-effects, buggy code.. what happens if the computer is damaged in the accident or pre-accident situation, but the car isn't done moving yet? Am I supposed to now rely on damaged equipment to save my life? Seems a little shady to me.

Jared writes "New P2P system to be unveiled tomorrow configured to share not only identical files, but also similar ones.
Called Similarity-Enhanced Transfer (SET), David G Andersen, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, and Michael Kaminsky of Intel Research Pittsburgh, have designed a new P2P protocol they claim could significantly increase download speeds because it is configured to share not only identical files, but also similar ones.
The two researchers behind SET, along with graduate student Himabindu Pucha of Purdue University, will present a paper describing SET and release the system code at the 4th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, on April 11th in Cambridge, Mass.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/8620/Faster+than+BitT orrent%3F"

Google Earth is a fascinating program that allows you to zoom in on virtually any location on earth using satellite imagery. As of today, however, when you search for Darfur, you are shown a large red region titled "Crisis in Darfur." This is one of the first times a search engine of this scale has become involved in international politics. Google looks at it as a way to educate its users to the atrocities occurring in the Democratic Republic of the Sudan.

"At Google, we believe technology can be a catalyst for education and action," Elliot Schrage, Google's vice president of global communications and public affairs told CNN. "'Crisis in Darfur' will enable Google Earth users to visualize and learn about the destruction in Darfur as never before and join the museum's efforts in responding to this continuing international catastrophe."

Crisis hot-spots are shown in red flames. When users zoom in on them, they are shown damaged and destroyed villages with photographic evidence. Also involved is the Holocaust museum which provided much of the content."

zyl0x (987342) writes "The UK's Daily Mail is reporting on a new bionic warrior for the American Infantry. The DoD hopes to have these babies out as soon as 2020. From the article:

Included in the Pentagon's Future Warrior Concept are a powerful exoskeleton, a self-camouflaging outer layer that adapts to changing environments and a helmet which translates a soldier's voice into any foreign language... If the U.S. military's vision of the future is even half-right, Britain's armed forces will have their work cut out trying to keep up.

boyko.at.netqos writes "Behold the future of the 1980s today! Network Performance Daily shows a video on "Netcosm," a three dimensional visualization of live network traffic that looks like the love child of Max Headroom and the Last Starfighter. Despite its "retro" motif, the 3D environment provides network status at a glance with dropped packets that explode, and servers that first smoke, then burst into flame."

An anonymous reader writes "The Wal-Mart Stores Inc. worker fired last month for intercepting a reporter's phone calls says he was part of a larger, sophisticated surveillance operation that included snooping not only on employees, but also on critics, stockholders and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
As part of the surveillance, the retailer last year had a long-haired employee infiltrate an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine if it planned protests at the company's annual meeting, according to Bruce Gabbard, the fired security worker, who worked in Wal-Mart's Threat Research and Analysis Group. The company also deployed cutting-edge monitoring systems made by a supplier to the Defense Department that allowed it to capture and record the actions of anyone connected to its global computer network. The systems' high-tech wizardry could detect the degree of flesh-tone on a viewed Internet image, and alerted monitors that a vendor sharing Wal-Mart networks was viewing pornography.
Wal-Mart has since disconnected some systems amid an internal investigation of the group's activities earlier this year, according to an executive in the security-information industry.
The revelations by Mr. Gabbard, many of which were confirmed by other former Wal-Mart employees and security-industry professionals, provide a rare window into the retail giant's internal operations and mindset. The company fired Mr. Gabbard, a 19-year employee, last month for unauthorized recording of calls to and from a New York Times reporter and for intercepting pager messages. Wal-Mart conducted an internal investigation of Mr. Gabbard and his group's activities, fired his supervisor and demoted a vice president over the group as well.
Mr. Gabbard says he recorded the calls on his own because he felt pressured to stop embarrassing leaks. But he says most of his spying activities were sanctioned by superiors. "I used to joke that Wal-Mart paid me to be paranoid and they got their money's worth," Mr. Gabbard says.
Wal-Mart says it permitted recording employee calls "only in compelling circumstances and with written permission from the legal department." But because pager messages were sent over a frequency that was not secure, Mr. Gabbard inadvertently intercepted pages from non-Wal-Mart employees as well. A U.S. attorney is investigating whether any laws were violated as a result of the phone and pager intercepts.
Aside from that possible infraction, Wal-Mart's surveillance activity appears to be legal. U.S. courts have long held that companies can read employee emails, and Wal-Mart employees are informed they have "no expectation of privacy" when using company-supplied computers or phones. The surveillance of people in public places is also legal.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB117565486864 559297-lMyQjAxMDE3NzA1OTYwNTk0Wj.html"

RCTrucker7 writes "NOTE: I only selected "XBox (Games)" as my Topic, because I couldn't find a Topic that entailed video games in general, or as a whole, and I currently own and play on an X-Box 360.
My Video Game Background; I'm a 37 year old male, who now plays games on the X-Box 360 and PC, but started out with an "Intellivision" as my first video game system.
My Question; Back when the PS1 came out and carried thru to the PS2 (I didn't have or play on the first X-Box or any of Nintendo's systems after the NES), it was quite common, especially in games that had "attributes" associated with your character ( say, Strength, Agility, and Speed for a Sports Game) or items that had fluctuating values associated with them (say, the number of bullets left in your clip, the number of health points left, or being invulnerable for a FPS game) to have codes put in place by the developers of a game, that either automatically changed the associated value, or allowed you to change it to your own desired level. For example, maybe you would push Up then Down on the Directional Pad, then hit Triangle, Square, Circle, X, X, Circle, Square, Triangle in a FPS game, and that would unlock all the weapons that were available in the game, with unlimited ammo for all of them too. Or you'd do some other sequence and that would allow you to fully jack up all the stats of your player in a football game. Then along came "outside" codes, via third-party hardware, such as the Game Shark and Code Breaker. These typically gave you all the developer codes and then some. But it seemed that even with these devices, games still had the tried-n-true developer codes in them. If you couldn't figure them out, then you could always buy "the book" or ask your video game playing God friend what the codes were. Then came along sites such as GameFaqs, where you could look up a game title, hit the "Cheats/Codes" link for it, and have the "keys to the kingdom" for your chosen game. It was great. But now, especially since I've been on the X-Box 360, I've noticed that when I hit that "Cheats/Codes" link for a game, all I get are "Unlockables" and what accomplishment/task/quest/etc needs to be done to unlock it. This is not including the "Achievements" for an X-Box 360 game. To me these are not Cheats or Codes. These are things already included in the game which "open" as part of the expected normal playing of the game. What happened to my "Up/Down/Up/Down/B/X/B/Y" developer code to give me unlimited ammo in "Rainbow Six: Vegas"? Or my "Left/Right/X/Y/X/Right/Left" developer code to give me "99" in all the stats of my SuperStar in Madden NFL '07? What happened to my beloved codes? I've only seen a couple of games in this "Next-Gen" of gaming that have them; "Saints Row" comes to mind as an excellent example. You pull out your in-game cell phone; enter a certain phone number and BAM! Unlimited Ammo. Call another number and BAM! Free cash in my pocket. So what happened? Where did all the codes go? Was there some secret developer summit that no one knows about, where they all decided that "From now on...there will be...NO...MORE...In-Game...CODES!!!"?"

clickclickdrone writes "A new report has just been published by the Royal Academy of Engineering that shows the extent of monitoring of individuals in the UK. The 62 page report reveals the following stats — 4.2 million CCTV cameras — one for every 14 people with 300,000 new ones every year. The average Londoner is recorded 300 times a day. There are 6,000 speed cameras and 20% of the worlds CCTV cameras are in the UK. It goes on to note other ways to track people such as the 27 million store cards, Google searches, DNA records and 10 million Oyster travel cards that allow detailed accounts of people's movements and activities to be build up. See http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_articl e_id=42574&in_page_id=34 fpr more details."

Fennec writes "Jeremiah Paleck wasn't too excited about the Vista launch, so he decided to have some fun, creating a sheet of Windows error stickers for A4 sticker paper (informing us gravely, "Error: The operation completed successfully"). BoingBoing and Engadget report, with an image of the sticker neatly placed in a Windows Vista advertisement at a bus stop in Prague. It seems that perhaps Vista's advertising campaign has been infected with a little "viral marketing"..."

smooth wombat (796938) writes "Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, will be moving in a new direction starting this week. He will be unveiling Citizendium, a competitor to Wikipedia which he hopes will have far fewer warts than Wikipedia does.

The difference this time is that those who contribute will be required to use their real names and experts in a given field will be asked to verify the facts. From the article:

"If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy and speaks slowly, as if cautiously choosing every word. "It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving.""

zyl0x (987342) writes "The Washington Post has a story online about the owner of a small Internet business and the recipient of an infamous "National Security Letter". Even though the FBI has retracted the order for information, they have yet to retract the gag order that accompanied the NSL. From the article:

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case — including the mere fact that I received an NSL — from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.